A Pictures Worth A 1,000 Calories

July 09, 2010

More and more all of us are coming to understand that whether we have a great metabolism, or a slow metabolism, we're only fooling ourselves when we don't heed the advice of the age old caloric formula that 1 lb of body fat gained or lost = 3,500 calories.

It's that simple.

Each of us has a very specific number of calories that we can consume each day to maintain our weight. So in order to lose weight,we need to know that number, and then we need to create a deficit of calories each day in some shape or form by eating less, exercising more, or ideally, doing both.

But this post is not about how to find that number. There are plenty of great sites where you can access that info by entering "how many calories can I eat a day?" into Google. This post is about an evolving visual tool that we're building and offering to help people have access to a visual library of images that will help them keep close at hand foods that they want to avoid, eat more of, and even foods that may not be the best for us, but if we're going to eat them, we at least can be much more conscious of the potential calories we're taking in.

This library of pics will only be about the calorie count, not fat grams, not sodium content, and not any other nutritional information, just calories.

Over time we'll share what we have up our sleeves as we connect the caloric dots through pictures.

These pics are judgement free, that's for you to decide.

Good calories, poor calories, eat this, not that, empty nutrition, preservatives, all organic... there's plenty of that info to go around, and to be honest, we're just not interested in adding more noise to those debates.

We just want to keep things simple and easy to digest, and pretty much just live in the caloric formula world... calories in, calories out, 1 lb = 3,500 calories.

We want these pics to be a part of the solution in helping win the global battle of the bulge 1 lb at a time.

Why would a Sausage McMuffin be worthy of the first image. Nothing special really, it's just what I had for breakfast this morning that's it.

No judgement, not saying it was good or bad, it is what it is in the caloric world, 335 calories...

And if you'd like to participate in helping us build what we think is going to be a very cool library of candid caloric pics that you can download to your computer, keep on your smart phone, print out for your fridge, keep by your desk, or post in your lunch room, please feel free to us send your requests for specific foods you'd like us to create caloric images for, and even better, send us your own candid pics to jay [at] mypetfat [dot] com and we'll make and share them.